Hi Terence,

Good point.

This wasn’t actually my post, I’m sure that Rauparaha will have some beautiful reasoning to give you 😉

The invasion of Iraq involves waging war against one country (or, more specifically, one dictator and the insurgency), WWs 1&2 involved much larger scale conflict, and Vietnam went on much longer, so – while this is an interesting graph – we have there’s a few apples in with your oranges…

For the “benefit” all that matters is your “ex-ante” expectations – if they really believed that there was some WMD, they are allowed to put it in the benefit category when choosing 😉

Indeed, this doesn’t actually tell us that the relative price is lower. However, I think the point rauparaha was getting at is that the war is now relatively more affordable 😉

“Given the way Saddam Hussein treated his own people and his country, perhaps we should be looking at the lives saved and environmental harm prevented by the Iraq war and setting that off against the cost.”

Indeed. Ultimately, in a world of politics it is about finding the appropriate counterfactual – when rauparaha was discussing these “costs” he was objectively splitting it away from the potential benefits caused by the given situation. Rather than making a statement on whether the war was right or wrong, he was trying to get a full idea of the cost involved.

One way of looking at this is as follows. If we knew 1 person would be killed directly as the result of the war, and that 1 person would be killed if we did not go to war (as a result of the administration) then 1 dead person is still a cost of going to war – however there is the benefit that we would have saved one person (from the counterfactual situation). These benefits are important when making a decision on whether to go to war – but they are not directly related to the calculation of the cost (which in the example is still 1 person).